"It's getting to the point where you don't have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody — even by a wrong call — and then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision decision you've even made, ever friend you've discussed something with, and attack you on that basis to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer."

Some people (including BI's Henry Blodget) are skeptical about Snowden's stunning claims, but it should be noted that the alleged ability of the NSA to collect Internet traffic and crunch it to profile any American has been corroborated by several other reporters and whistleblowers.

Furthermore, New York Times writers James Risen and Eric Lichtblau — who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for this story on warrantless government surveillance — report that "Verizon had set up a dedicated fiber-optic line ... allowing government officials to gain access to all communications flowing through the carrier’s operations center."

“More and more services like Google and Facebook have become huge central repositories for information,” Dan Auerbach, a technology analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Times. “That’s created a pile of data that is an incredibly attractive target for law enforcement and intelligence agencies.”

The scary thing, as Snowden points out, is that the bulk of the attractive targets arising from that data are innocent Americans.